Counting Stars
by beaner.weener
Summary: I swallow. "Why are you so scared?" It's almost as if she was waiting for this question. The answer bounces back in a heartbeat. "I'm not scared, they're scared." She laughs without humor. "Bloody hell, I'm a psychopath. A sociopath. I could kill you without batting an eyelash. And you still trust me?" I don't wait a split second. "I trust you completely. I care."
1. First

**First**

My office is dimly lit, the lamp glares against my reading lenses. I have one more appointment scheduled in the day. And in no way am I looking forward to it.

Last week, my secretary warned me of her. "New patient," she said with a small frown. "I've read her records. You might need to be wary of this one."

"How so?" I hummed, blinking at her. "Criminal record?"

My secretary shook her head. "High profile anxiety, insomnia, and OCD. Some call her a sociopath. Most of the records I've read, the other therapists, call her an intelligent psychopath. The longest a single psychiatrists have lasted with her is two weeks." She put the folder, the size of a small dictionary, on my neat desk with a small _plop. _"You'll be seeing her in one week's time. Good luck." I didn't look up at her as the click-clack of her heels made its way out the door and into her car, and eventually to her house.

Today is the day of that appointment.

Intelligent psychopath. No criminal record. Isolation, anxiety, OCD.

An interesting case, for sure.

From a doctor's standpoint, I can honestly say she will not be in my office for over two weeks. From a human's standpoint, however, I will try my hardest to make it so she does.

I close her file and slide it into a desk drawer. Silence and calm dark follow me as I walk to and open the door. The waiting room is empty except for one dark corner. In it resides a woman, looking not much more than a girl, with a meticulous blonde bun and sunken gray eyes.

"Miss Chase," I say. "Come in."

She purses her lips and hovers in the corner opposed from the lamp for one more minute. Then, slowly, she stands and walks toward the open door. I make mental notes of her.

_Predisposed to isolated, dark spaces. Good posture, practical clothing. Blank expression._

I follow her figure into my office. "Have a seat. Would you like a cup of tea?"

A slight eyebrow raise is all I get from her. I take it as a yes, and pull out a tea mug I had been saving for myself from the microwave, water still hot, and plop a teabag in it.

She is still standing. "Have a seat. I insist." I hand her the mug of steaming leaf water.

Without blinking or moving her eyes, she takes the mug in her taut, pale hands and sweeps into a chair. I sit in the one opposite her.

"So, Miss Chase." She meets my eyes. "Why do I have the pleasure of seeing you today?"

She is silent. I had read, in the reports, she had a way of not saying anything that said way too much. I was skeptical until I saw it.

She doesn't want to be here.

"Annabeth." I pause. "Is it okay if I call you that?" No response. "I'll take that as a yes. Annabeth, you are here for a reason. That reason is not obvious to me, so I need you to say. I can't help you if you don't say." I try to make my voice as gentle as possible, but I can see why the other psychiatrists disposed of her. Two and a half minutes is all it took to make me angry.

She rolls her eyes, and five minutes of silence pass.

I take a breath. "I've read your file," I begin, and she snorts.

"And?" Her voice has a trace of an accent, from where I can't tell. It could be Russian, Polish, or German.

"And I've decided to disregard what the others had to say completely." Her eye twitches. "I've never paid much attention to other opinions. I'd rather formulate one for myself. Labels, I've found, are of no use unless I make them myself. But I can't help you if you don't want to be helped."

"So don't."

I sigh and look at my reading glasses on my desk. "Let me rephrase that." I lean away from the back of my chair, elbows on my knees, and into what should be her smell. She is the first patient I've ever had without a distinct smell (perfume or otherwise), and it startles me slightly. She's good at hiding who she is. "I want to help you. But why are you here if you don't want to be helped?"

Her eyelids narrow. "Didn't my file tell you that?"

I lie, because I want to hear it from her own mouth, and suck in a breath. "No."

"Funny. Because it did for the last one. I suggest you look harder."

I let the heavy breath out. "I'd rather you tell me, Annabeth."

She meets my eyes once more and takes a sip of her tea, the tendons in her hand protruding. "I don't appreciate being psychoanalyzed." She raises her mug to her lips again. "Well, Doctor Jackson? Go on."

So I tell her what I've read, in as few words as possible. "Your Latin professor in college suggested to your parents to have you taken to a therapist – again. You were eighteen, but a senior in college, and you thoroughly refused. This led to that led to a legal battle in which you were deemed unsafe to yourself and others, and your parents were given full control. They slammed you to one psychiatrist, to another, and finally to me. And you are here. And you _will _cooperate." I stand and walk to the window on the right side of the room and draw the curtains, then do the same with the next two windows. The room gets progressively darker until the only the lamp on my desk remains.

I sit. "Now," I say, a finger turning off the lamp in _onetwothree _clicks. "Tell me what you see."

An immediate reply. "It's black, you idiot, I can't see anything."

I smile and flick the lamp back on. "A realist."

The lines in her neck stand out as she waits for more, and realizing she's not getting any, she whispers, "I don't see things the way people want me to. I see what's actually there."

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. I raise an eyebrow. "What do you see?"

The appointment timer clicks, and without missing a beat, she slams her fist down on it and is halfway out the door before I can blink.

"I dismiss you," I call. "Not the timer."

And then she's gone.

I sink into my chair with an exhaling breath. "Next week, then," I growl at the car engine starting.

Glad to be going home.

_A/N: Obviously this is a therapist/patient AU. I'm sorry if I get any terminology wrong. However, I assure you, it will be sparse. _

_::Binna::_


	2. Second

**Second**

TickTickTickTickTickTickTickgoestheclockonemoreappointmentinthedayhelpmeplease.

I am so tired I could melt into this chair until there is nothing left of me but fabric and fluff. But I will not do that. I have one left.

Who?

I check my appointment book.

_Ah. She's a daily._

Take off my reading lenses, stand, walk, and open the door. "Miss Chase?" The words come out hurried, breathless, but I haven't been running. She blinks at me and click/clacks in time with the clock over to her chair. I follow her and grab the same mug from yesterday, microwave the water in silence and plop a bag in.

Her hand reaches for the mug. She is behind me, smelling of cloves and coffee and cold winter snow and – . . I flash myself back into existence, and she is sitting in the chair opposing me. I am sitting, too.

When did this happen?

"Excuse me, please, Annabeth." My voice sounds strange to my ears, foreign, not belonging to me. The vibrations echo through my teeth as normal, but down through my spine and into my lungs and limbs as well.

I exit the room and go to the bathroom, open a cabinet and take out a box, take a bottle from the box and a pristine white pill from the bottle, and put it in my mouth and swallow it and

I blink.

And I'm back.

The buzzing in my head is gone. I calm my breathing as I make my way to my final patient, staring blankly at the wall in a way that says more than words could.

"So do you think I'm crazy?" we say, at the same time.

I laugh. She doesn't.

"I don't think you're crazy." I say, paying close attention to how the light changes on her face, the shadows deepen and the highlights become brighter.

"Well," she sips her tea. "I think you are."

I laugh again. "That lies in your perception of the word, yes."

A long pause.

"We're just alike, the two of us," she says quietly. "You went into psychology because you're crazy. I was going into it, but was kicked out because _I'm_ crazy."

I lean against my desk. "You know this how?"

Her eyes are still unseeing, fixed on a point too far away to notice. She smiles, and it looks strange on her face. "I don't know. I saw."

Ten minutes pass; I don't know what to say to her.

"I'm getting paid whether you talk or not, Annabeth," I inform her.

"I'm not the one paying," is her immediate answer.

The clock ticks away five more minutes, only pausing when I take a breath or she drinks her tea. The present slinks away, followed by the futurefuturefuturefuturefut

damn it, these pills don't work.

I need her to talk. I need to stop focusing on me and start focusing on her.

I breathe. "Why won't you talk to me?"

I see the focus in her eyes get closer/closer\closer/closer\\\\\\here. They burn holes through the air and into my sockets, but it's better than that _fucking _clock.

She's present. Still doesn't speak, but she's thinking about speaking. Which is good. Very good.

"You're different." Finally. "You don't think I'm insane. You don't think I'm a psychopath."

I shake my head. "I never said that. I said I would have to wait and decide on my own before listening to any of the therapists that wrote your reports." –she raises an eyebrow – "Besides, psychopaths are not crazy. They are fully aware of their actions and the consequences of their actions. But they do what they do anyway."

She swallows audibly and sets her tea on my desk, gripping the chair with both hands. "So what am I, then?"

I walk over to her chair and kneel beside it. Her eyes are still fixed in the place where I used to be. I place a hand on one of hers. It is shaking with tension and cold, despite the warmth of the tea. Her head turns. I wait until her pupils contract to the point where she is fixated on me entirely before talking.

The gentleness in my voice surprises me. "I can't tell you if you don't tell me. But I'm just a psychiatrist, Annabeth. I don't have the legal power to give a formal diagnosis."

She glances at our hands and her eyes narrow. I speak up before she does. "My methods have always been fairly unorthodox."

Her voice and its implacable accent are sharp. "When I was studying psychology – before they decided I was a whack-job – I always thought that was the problem. When you start trying to tailor the person to the method and not the method to the person. I actually never liked to call it a method for that specific reason – too methodical. It's like a factory. And if you can't make it work, if the machine runs out of material, you ship them to an asylum with more thread."

I think that alone was more than everything she said to me yesterday combined. My response has to be careful, measured to fit and pressure without harming. I begin. "You love methods."

Better than I expected.

Her reply takes three minutes and six seconds (I count – that ticking is making my stomach boil). "Yes."

The timer ticks. A mixture of relief and disappointment washes through me. I can go home and knock myself out for a few hours until I have to wake up, but at the same time, this is what I call _progress._

She begins to stand, draining her tea (when did that get back in her hand?), but I tighten my grip. She looks down at me, without breaking eye contact, she eases herself up. I replicate. And then I become painfully aware that I am holding her hand and I'm breathing a little too hard. The air around her makes sure I know she didn't miss it.

A couple minutes pass. The timer ticks again – like a snooze button.

I release her hand. "Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow is Saturday. Your office is closed, Doctor Jackson."

"Call me Percy, if you like."

"I don't think so."

And then the clock is back and I need to get out of here. We exit together, not a word or glance between us.

_I got bored. I hope this was alright._

_I know it wasn't. Sorry. _

_Leave me a review. Flame me if you like. I deserve it. _

_::Binna::_


	3. Third

**Third**

I wake up at 4:00 for my meeting with the local psychiatrists at 5:30 and head to the vegetarian diner and coffee bar down the street. I've never understood why it opens at 4:30; normal people don't wake up that early.

As I expected, there is nobody there but a barista who is half-asleep leaning on her arms when I enter. At the _dingding _of the door, she snorts and startles awake.

She coughs. "How can I help you today, sir?"

I place my order, a plain black coffee in the largest size they carry. She comments on how anyone awake at this hour could use one of those and disappears into the back room.

A few minutes later, another employee with tired eyes carries a medium-large coffee cup out of the back. "Medium-large black coffee, no sugar?" he asks me.

"I ordered extra-large, but that's alright," I say. They never mess up orders, but it's easy to forgive a small error, especially when it's so early in the morning. He frowns.

"I didn't take your order," he says slowly.

"No," says a voice from behind me. "You took mine." Five dollars passes between a thin white hand and his tanned one, and the same hand reaches to grab her coffee. "Hello, Doctor Jackson. To what or whom do I owe the pleasure of seeing you so early this morning?"

I play the silent game with her until my extra-large coffee arrives from the brunette barista, but she does not move.

There is a buzz from my pocket and I check my phone.

_Meeting cancelled. Wife in labor. Sorry for the inconvenience, go back to sleep. CB_

I sigh. "Nothing, anymore." Sip at my hot coffee. "What are you doing up so early?"

"Bored," she says, sitting down at a table. I think about leaving, but I'm awake. Where am I going to go? So I sit across from her. I feel like I'm back at my office, trying to discreetly psychoanalyze her. She always catches on.

"You never answered my question."

"You never answer plenty of mine," I reply.

"I'm not trying to psychoanalyze you."

"What do you have against it anyway?" I ask. "I'm just trying to do you some good."

She folds her hands over her cup, fingers soaking up the steam. "I hate having other people in my head."

I hum.

"They move things around, plant bombs that detonate weeks later. And if they get too close, they screw themselves up."

I hum slightly harder, but she doesn't say anything else. Her eyes are fixed on the stained lip of her drink. I bet if I touch her face, it'll crack and break into shards of ice.

She's hard and cold already, might as well be.

I shake my head. It's my job, as a therapist, not to take opinions of patients other than professional ones. But as a human being who still has instincts and impulses like an animal, I decide to test my hypothesis on her hands.

Her eyes shoot to mine and we don't blink and . .

"Get back on your side of the table," is her calm response.

"Sorry." I take a drink of the dark liquid in front of me. "I was just making sure you aren't made of glass."

Her left eyebrow raises. "What makes you think I'm made of glass?"

I replicate her hands and hold my coffee close. "You look like a sculpture," is all I can manage.

I'm not allowed this. This is bad. It might interfere with her treatment. But she is intelligent and deep and beautiful and maybe a little crazy, but all the best people are. I don't like this.

Fifteen silent minutes pass. She finishes her coffee in about five. I toss mine when it's still half full. I glance at my phone and decide I should probably shoot Charles a text back, but I don't. Either way, since I'm here I might as well order breakfast.

I'm not a vegetarian, but this place is the best for miles. I order scrambled eggs with spinach and vegetarian bacon from the blond man who gave Annabeth her drink.

My phone reads 5:07 when the eggs are ready, and 5:10 when the soft hipster music starts playing from the speakers, and 5:14 when a few other people begin to leak in. I them: they are my party of various shrinks.

"Percy," one by the name of Jason says, smiling, and nods to Annabeth. "Is this your girlfriend?"

I laugh, but my heart starts hammering and I try to make it get back to normal. Annabeth turns her head, which had been fixed on the back wall for 9 minutes, to him.

"Do I look like I have much of a romantic life?" she asks in her monotone.

My mind says _yes_ but my mouth continues laughing and says, "Annabeth is a patient of mine, Jason." I could stab him.

Unfortunately, that's illegal.

A tall, thickly built Asian-Canadian by the name of Frank Zhang squints his eyes and opens his mouth to speak. Annabeth cuts him off.

"I know you, Doctor Zhang. Were you two days, or three?"

He replies in a slightly startled tone. "I thought you never forgot anything."

She smiles bitterly and without humor. "I don't."

A scarecrow of a shrink, the irritating mass with a superiority complex that is Octavian, settles his suit with his hands. I remember reading about him and Annabeth. One appointment was enough for her to irritate him and have him drop her as a patient. He's a good psychiatrist, but he has no patients or patience, both correlated with the other. He needs patients to gain patience, but without patience he loses patients. Funny how these things work.

Jason speaks again. "If you'd care to join us, we're holding our meeting without Charles."

Our "meetings" were pretty much gossip sessions about patients – seeing how far we could drag another before we hit the boundaries of patient confidentiality. I glance from the group of four – a small, funny man that is a wonderful person to talk to called Leo hangs in the back, wearing his classic suspenders and bowtie – to Annabeth, eyes staring emptily at the back wall, hands cupped around her second cup of coffee. If I were to go, surely she would be the main topic of conversation. Three of the quartet had attempted to treat her, Leo lasting the longest – two and a half weeks, if I remember correctly.

"I'll join you next month."

Jason shrugs and they take a table in the opposite corner. I feel the glances and whispers as they try to break down why/how/how long I will treat her. The time is 5:49 when Annabeth picks up her bag and sweeps out of the diner, dropping her coffee into the trash. Not a word has passed between us since before the others arrived.

I think about joining them, but doing so would mean the risk of exposing my desire to become friends with Annabeth Chase, and that could be very bad. I really don't want to drop her.

So I head shopping. I browse but don't buy, wander aimlessly through stores until it is 7:30 and I might need to do something important.

Tomorrow is Sunday, which means sleeping until 2 in the afternoon and watching Netflix with a takeout pizza until I collapse. Monday, of course, will be frighteningly promising.

_I really don't know what I'm doing. I feel like this is Hannibal. And it was mostly an accident; I didn't mean for it to come out that way._

_Speaking of Hannibal, has anyone seen the new episode because HOLY SHITBUCKETS THAT IS HOW YOU START A SEASON._

_::Binna::_


	4. Fourth

_**Fourth**_

Monday ticks past in the quavering brief dawn of another week. I help a man with cancer come to terms with the fact he actually _has _cancer, a woman who lost a child to suicide cope with grief, and two anxiety-ridden teenagers, one a boy and one a girl, loosen the tension in their shoulders and clear their minds at war. A sharp knock is on my door at 6 o'clock sharp; my last patient of the day.

I was just about to get her.

I swing the thick slab of wood that isolates my office from the rest of the world open and come face-to-face with a young woman with more problems than I can count on both hands.

"Annabeth," I smile. "Do come in."

"I was intending on it," she says. Her tone is light compared to the other times I've spoken to her. A good mood, then.

In what had quickly become almost a ritual to us, she sits in the seat opposite mine as I microwave her a mug of tea. Teabag goes in goes on the table.

A quirk of an eyebrow introduces her question. "You feeling any more stable?"

I laugh shortly. "I'm your therapist, not the other way around."

Her good mood dissipates, swirls out the window and into the cold. I make a mental note about those words: I need to find out why, exactly, that phrasing is irritating for her. "Why, are you? Feeling any more stable, that is?"

She mimics my laugh, but hers has no humor in it. "Does it matter?"

I don't reply instantly, I think about my options. I want to tell her that yes, it matters, for god's sake, _she _matters, but instead I quote her, dancing around her question but hopefully implying an answer.

"We're just alike, the two of us," I say. It's not a direct answer, but hopefully it'll imply the _yes_ I intoned, and maybe become a conversation starter.

She closes her eyes and reclines her head against the couch. Almost all of the tension I had seen in her last week is gone, replaced by a steely calm that made me more nervous than her intense gaze looking past anything I could see.

"Quoting the patient," she pronounces softly. "Lazy psychiatry, Doctor Jackson."

I shrug and lean forward. "Lazy but effective."

Her head tilts to her right. "Not on me. I know your techniques. I know how to avoid them."

The clock ticks fifteen silent minutes, every single second of which I want to say something to her, I want to reach out and have her reach back, because I can see this is a good day for her. But something holds me back. It takes me almost the entire fifteen minutes to realize what it is.

In school, we were taught to let the patient initiate conversation, to let them be the ones to draw the lines and simply make sure we were pushing them against those lines every single visit, until the lines recede, recede, recede, are gone.

On the final tick of the fifteenth minute, I decide that my unconventionality would have to be extended to cover that principle when dealing with Annabeth.

I take a breath before speaking and then –

"Not what you're thinking," she whispers softly.

A flare of anger nags at me. How could she know what I was thinking? I think a lot. To what exact thing was she referring? She had fifteen minutes, 900 entire seconds to say exactly those four words, but she chooses the space _directly before_ I was speaking.

I take another breath.

"Think harder."

My anger snaps. "What are you even _talking _about, Annabeth? You never answer my questions, you avoid conversation, you waste fifteen of both of our minutes saying nothing in your little dreamworld seventy miles away, and then you tell me to _think harder. _I'm thinking harder, and I think you should _try harder_."

Her head tilts forward so she is looking at me again, and I can stare into her eyes and not at her chin.

"I want to help you, but if you won't _let me_, I can't." My voice simmers in that awkward space between comforting and yelling.

She closes her eyes and says nothing for the time remaining in her scheduled visit.

I am angry at myself for being angry, for losing my temper with her, possibly erasing every ounce of progress we made.

When the timer dings, she leaves her untouched tea on my table, and slowly walks to the door. I swallow and follow her.

As she opens the door, I touch her shoulder. She turns and watches me prepare my words, and then, in the split second before I speak, she interrupts.

"I can't, Percy." Her voice is weary and the sound of my first name coming from her lips resonates in my head. I know what is going on now: it's common with patients suffering from depression or other related conditions. She's okay today, better than she was before, but at the same time, it's too much of a scary place to be, paper thin glass holding her above a busy Manhattan street. I always tell my patients to calm down during times like this, make sure they can count possible triggers on one hand repeat affirmations to thicken the glass. She likely already knows these techniques. Even more likely, they don't work with her,

"Hey." I move the hand on her shoulder to rest on her neck, and then pull her into a hug, feeling like I need to repair the delicate patient/psychiatrist relationship we had, thin and frail as a spider web. "Don't feel bad, just remember who you are."

She coughs into my chest. "I know who I am."

I shake my head and rest my chin on the top of her head. "No, you don't. Not today."

Her response is biting. "I'm insane, not in the middle of an identity crisis."

She feels small in my arms. This is not a good idea, but it may be what she needs. What I think makes me different from other therapists like Jason or Leo or – god forbid – Octavian is that I value a patient's mental state over my job. If someone were to walk in this room right now, not only would they hit Annabeth in the back of the head with the door, I might be walking on coals for the next few months regarding my employment state.

"I won't keep you longer than is needed," I say, releasing her. "But come back tomorrow."

"Will do." She pretends to half-smile and I pretend to ignore her whispered 'maybe' as she closes the door.

**Oh no. I done fucked up so bad. I am so sorry I can't write romance for the life of me and this is moving too fast but I can't write at all and ugh I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry. It'll get better when I get the chance to add more canon details like fatal flaws and human parents and things like that. Mrs. O'Leary will make an appearance or two. Stick around guys! It'll get better. Maybe. **

**On a kind of related note, did anyone see Hassun this Friday because HOLY HELL HANNIGRAHAM.**

"**He cares about you." "He is and always will be my friend." *Hannibal inner monologue: how many people do I have to kill to get Will out of jail let's find out one, two, three***


End file.
